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Following is the speech by the Deputy Secretary for Planning, Environment and Lands, Mr Kim Salkeld, at the seventh International Symposium on River Sedimentation and second International Symposium on Environmental Hydraulics today (Wednesday):

Welcome on behalf of SAR Government to all visitors to HK for this Symposium. Thanks to the local organisers for their courtesy in inviting me to join you this evening, despite my lack of scientific or engineering credentials. Exchange between the academic and the policy-making communities advances the interests and understanding of both.

For those of you visiting, you come to Hong Kong with all the razzmatazz of end of empire and return of sovereignty, all the heady excitement of booming stock markets behind us. In its place you find a story that has enduring interest for us and for the world, of how this remarkable city - over six million people crammed into just over 400 square miles, most of it mountain - how this city is working to offer a decent way of life in a sustaining environment.

Water, of course, is at the root of many of the equations with which we work. We must secure enough water to support all those people. We must keep it clean to protect their health. We must make sure our rivers, bays and seas remain vibrant and productive environments, able to help sustain us in our own needs for health, enjoyment and food, and able to sustain diverse and important natural life.

As in many other cities, there have been lengthy controversies here about the impact that we are having on our marine environment, over the investments we need to make to protect our waters. But there has also been action, and there is real progress to report. The latest survey of river water quality shows only 15 per cent of our rivers with bad or very bad water quality, compared with 52 per cent in 1988 and 23 per cent last year. Sixty-eight per cent now have good to excellent water quality, compared with 27per cent 10 years ago. The infrastructure to collect and treat sewage from the main urban areas is being put in place and is already beginning to reduce the pollution load that we have been putting into the inner harbour.

But there is a great deal more still to be done, both in the building of sewage infrastructure to address today's problems and meet short to medium-term demands, and in the assessment and planning of what we will need to do in future to make better use of our water supplies, to improve further sewage collection and treatment systems, and to reduce the environmental pressures that we exert on our neighbourhood. It is said that good fences make good neighbours, well, good sewage treatment does that too: it is indispensable to good cities.

The breadth of expertise that has gathered here for this symposium gives strong grounds for encouragement that despite the complex problems and enormous pressures we face, effective responses can be found to the environmental and engineering challenges that we face.

I don't presume to be able to offer you any useful advice on 'Large Scale Flow Structures', or Yellow River Sedimentation, or even pollution in the Yuen Long nullah. You all know far more about water and its dynamics than I do. All I can lay claim to is an interest in the power that water has, both in the human imagination and in fact.

There is a nice reflection that arises from the thought that it is the power of boiling water that blows a tree apart when it is struck by lightning, not the lightning itself. The reflection is this: just imagine what happens when one of those great cactuses in the desert - a tall, spiky, spongeful of water - gets hit by lightning? Check the weather forecast next time before you visit Arizona or Mexico.

But while I can't share any real science with you, what I can do is share a few thoughts about the process of trying to respond to the forces of nature, and to the forces of population and public aspirations, in ways that cope successfully with tensions and promote harmony and stability. That is the process in which we are both deeply involved in our different ways. Its the process that is summed up in that still rather vaguely defined and understood concept of sustainable development.

All the few thoughts that I have revolve around the importance of sharing and communicating knowledge.

That is something that all of you, as engineers or scientists of water are most aptly fitted for. After all, one of the founders of the scientific method and the academic tradition from which you come compared human knowledge itself to water. "The knowledge of man" wrote Francis Bacon in his great essay 'The Advancement of Learning', "the knowledge of man is as the waters, some descending from above and others springing from beneath, the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by divine revelation."

Whatever you may think about that comparison, I'm sure that you all share the understanding of the critical importance of the respect that we pay to water, the way in which we treat, use and manage it, for the stability and success of our cities, whether looking at their social constructs or their engineering structures.

But how do we communicate that understanding in terms that mean something to our fellow citizens - that give them reasonable guidance about important and often expensive choices they need to make - while being honest with all the complexities of the issues and doubts and uncertainties that we have?

Here in Hong Kong, as in many other cities, we have been discussing how to develop what for want of a better term we call 'indicators of sustainable development' - indicators that get us away from the narrow focus and two dimensional picture given by GDP growth and help us to see economic processes as they work together with environmental and social developments to shape our city. The hope is that by seeing a fuller picture of how the city works, we can then together better assess the effects that new plans and ideas might have, so that we are more likely to make choices that will maximise the environmental and social benefits as well as the economic gains. By that we hope to secure a healthy economy and a reasonably happy society while preserving a natural environment that can sustain us and our descendants.

The Government is calling this work we are doing to try to reshape our planning and decision making process by the grand title of 'The Study on Sustainable Development for the Twenty-First Century'. In best bureaucratic tradition we have come up with the acronym 'SusDev 21'. But if we are going to turn our hope into a useful and accepted aid for advancing public discourse and decision making, we need to have your interest, your involvement, your advice.

As engineers and scientists, you have professional skills that can be applied to the consideration of particular indicators, to help determine what are the most suitable to use and what limitations they have that we need to keep in mind.

As individual citizens, you have your own ideas and voice as to what qualities in this city are most important to you and to your families. You can help to shape how we use our improving understanding of the processes at work here to protect or enhance those qualities.

As scientists and engineers you are well aware that many of your fellow citizens have some scepticism as to your credentials to be able to give good advice as to what is or is not a more sustainable way of doing things. Many feel that it is the works of engineers and scientists that have given rise to much of the environmental damage and social dislocation that we have to grapple with.

Such feelings and arguments can't be left unanswered without grave damage to the good governance of a city. A response has to be made. I would suggest that the response needs two attributes.

The first is humility, humility rather than hectoring assurance that we know the solutions. That is a caution that applies probably more to the policy maker than to the scientist. There are constant pressures on us to show leadership, to tell people that there are answers, and it is very tempting to say that the answer lies in technology or infrastructure. Corn dryer. We have to be willing to listen and to learn.

Humility, but also engagement - questioning, advising, debating, teaching, and focusing discussion on the important choices that have to be made. That's a role that you are well able to play. It is vital because pseudo-science, half-knowledge, half digested ideas culled from media sound bites and snapshots - and very often simple, honest misunderstanding - all those are in no way lesser threats to the health and stability of our society and environment than is overconfident assertion of human capacity.

The grim arguments that we have had here for many years over the sewerage system for the old city areas illustrates the importance of both these points. The facts are quite simple. We have been putting 440 million cubic metres of untreated sewage into our inner harbour every year. As a point of comparison, we only moved 350 million cubic metres of material to make the new airport. But getting agreement on how to treat the sewage and how to pay for it has been bedevilled by many unnecessary conflicts and digressions.

I am immensely grateful to several gentlemen here this evening who have taken the time in recent months to step out into the public arena, to help address the questions and doubts that had been troubling others and so making it difficult for decisions to be made on sewerage development. I hope that with your help we have begun to put those problems behind us, begun to help our fellow citizens to see the project for what it is - a complex but achievable piece of engineering; not a final solution in itself, but an essential part of the improving infrastructure that this great city needs; not a huge cost to Hong Kong, but a means to prevent us all from suffering from the terrible costs of environmental degradation; a project that shows Hong Kong taking a responsible step towards sustaining the environment for ourselves and for our neighbours.

I must apologise to our visitors for having gone off into parochial detail about Hong Kong, but I do hope that in some of the things I have said this evening, and through what you see, read and talk about with us while you are here, you gain some insight into the human dynamics of this exciting city, in return for the insights you have been sharing with us about hydrodynamics.

And for all of you who have the pleasure of living and working in this extraordinary place, I look forward to continuing to share with you in the work of maintaining Hong Kong as one of the world's great economic centres by making sure that it also becomes one of the world's leading cities for the quality of its environment and for the civility and understanding that is brought to public dialogue.

End/Wednesday, December 16, 1998

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